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This is a topic that started bugging me back in January, when I found out that my home town, a city in Manitoba of 40,000 people in an area servicing 100,000 in the southwest corner of the province was losing their one and only TV station. This leaves the news in the town up to a second-rate newspaper and the local radio stations.
This was the first thing that really piqued my interest in the new generation of media we are entering. This new media has the news being reported by every ‘man on the street’ with a smart phone, and leaves educated media high and dry, unable to pay their employees and cutting corners to make ends meet. It is a new ‘up-to-the-second’ world where people are still trying to hold onto the ways of the past. Like any growing entity, these changes are going to cause growing pains and massive problems, but at the end, we are going to be in a better place when we get there.
The second time my interest was drawn into the thought of new media was when the state of newspapers across the continent started taking a turn for the worse. Lately, the NY Times began placing ads on the front page for the first time in its history to try to offset dropping ad revenue. The historic Chicago Tribune made massive cuts (downsizing their newsroom by about 10%) and claimed bankruptcy in December of last year. In March, the Seattle Post Intelligencer stopped publishing newspapers for the first time in 146 years, moving instead to only online delivery. These changes can somewhat be attributed to the way news was first delivered on the net: free. I believe, dating back a decade to the start of online delivery, papers and news outlets alike will agree that a huge mistake was made by putting this info online for free (not that there was a way around it). In retrospect, the major publishers should have come together and agreed to make content available for a cost…but that mistake cannot be corrected now. It has slid down that slope, and that bell cannot be un-rung.
In addition to the changing form of media, papers, TV, and even radio are sending less people out to cover events. Instead of seeing a swarm of microphones in front of Sidney Crosby as he celebrates in the dressing room, there is now just a national media microphone, a local TV reporter, and the dreaded Associated Press reporter. That AP reporter is feeding his story to all outlets around the globe, rather than outlets like the Calgary Herald spending coin on sending their own reporter out. It definitely doesn’t give a broad perspective on the event.
No longer do you pick up a newspaper in the morning to see the news, and no longer do you sit down to watch the news on the evening TV. Now, we go directly to the internet… do not pass go, do not collect $200. This has become is our lifeline to information. We live in a world where its inhabitants NEED to be updated on events to the second! In my head, this revolution started with two planes crashing into the twin towers back in September 2001. At that moment of time, there wasn’t a person I know that wasn’t glued to the television, wanting up to the second images of hijacked planes and burning buildings. It was the beginning of people needing information as soon as it happens!
Since then, it has all evolved into a situation that can be exemplified by another international revolution that occurred just a few days ago, one that also changed the world… but not in the way you think. The event I am talking about is the recent election in Iran, and the uprising of the people against an oppressive dictator. And how it changed the world is that it was reported to the general public through a new medium HOURS before news outlets like CNN or FOX News could break into their weekend reruns to tell the public about. The medium I speak of is no other than the same medium I wrote about just a few weeks ago, ranting on how it pisses me off. Twitter.
For the first time in history, people around the globe were getting inside info about an international story before the big boys could put a man in Tehran.
There are obvious gaps to this form of media and how it is reported, but the fact is that ‘tweets’ were being sent from inside the riot zone, from people who were protesting or even being tear gassed. It was pretty remarkable to know that Joe Schmo in Louisiana was getting information ‘tweeted’ to him before CNN was talking about it. He was able to get the ‘tweets’ on the fly as he sat and surfed the internet. Hell, he could have had the tweets sent directly to his phone as a text message. He was learning about it the same time CNN was. It’s quite astonishing that he could get the information first hand, as the event is happening, no matter where he was in the world.
This new shift in media is causing problems at all levels, from local to national to international. Newspapers, the dinosaur of the bunch, are being pushed to the wayside by consumers. Distribution is drastically down, and that means ad revenue falls drastically. Their other main source of revenue dried up a few years ago when people stopped using the classifieds and opted for free, online ad shops like Craigslist and Kijiji. I am afraid to say it, but newspapers are a dying breed… I mean, nothing in the Daily newspaper is even from that day. Who wants news that is a day old?
The same is occurring on TV, as well. Ad revenue is dropping at an astounding rate (11.9% in the first Q of 2009). This is attributed to a lack of interest in television, but also to the economic slowdown.
I often sit and wonder how the news will be fed to us in 5 years… 10 years…
Let’s start locally… How will the people in SW Manitoba be getting their news? Right now, the only way to get breaking news is radio and the internet… but even in a town like Brandon that is slow. More importantly, though, is how they are going to get the DAILY news? The solution for this, I believe, lies in internet broadcasts… Allowing the citizens of the area to log onto the news site daily and download the news of the past 24 hours. The good news with this (no pun intended) is that this style of reporting in an area like SW Manitoba can charge for the broadcasts, as they will have a monopoly on the medium. So they can ask the locals for $5 or $10 a month to watch… and they will get 10,000 subscribers. Now if only someone could be this entrepreneurial in an area filled with farmers and old people.
As for national and international news, wow, I am baffled. Newspapers are a dying breed. How are the suffering TV stations going to be able to keep up with up to the minute news when the free media like twitter beat them to the punch? And more importantly, how are they going to be able to make revenue when advertisers are cutting their budget at an astounding rate? Hell, one of the most interesting stats I heard while on this path to media enlightenment was that even internet revenue for large media conglomerates was down in the 5% in the first Q of 2009. That is the first drop in this category since the internet became a legitimate source over a decade ago! So even the place where this new media is going strong has a revenue stream that is drying up faster than a creek in a Manitoba drought.
To me, the whole thing is just a massive mind fuck, and I am not sure what the solution is. I am actually not sure if people even understand the issue with lack of revenue streams and the adoption of new media yet, but I believe that in the future, there will be a large failure in the news as we see it, and that is when people will perk up and understand that these issues exist.
With all of that said, I think the world is on the cusp of a new form of media. I think it is going to be very twitter-like, if not twitter itself. The people of today’s generation demand to-the-second updates, and this quick-updated medium is fulfilling the need. But this leaves reporting in the hands of the everyday folk, and with only 140 characters (the maximum size of a ‘tweet’) to deliver the ‘news’ it’s tough to tell the whole story. It also creates a biased news source (but in the US, I guess they are kind of used to this now!). It also, once again removes the revenue from this reporting.
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Please give me some feedback on this topic. Like I said, its one that really interests me, so I would like to hear your thoughts, too.
MB
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